‘We had so much going for us, and we still managed to screw it up,’ he says, slurring slightly. ‘How did we end up here?’
‘Andrew—’
He silences me with a kiss.
For a split second, I’m too stunned to respond. But my body knows what I need better than I do, and the muscle memory of my heart is too ingrained for me to hesitate more than a moment. There are four years of pent-up yearning in the kiss I return, four years of waiting and wanting and pain and longing. Every neuron in my body comes alive, and I realise that I have been dormant, living in suspended animation, since the day he left.
Abruptly, Andrew breaks away. I brace myself for the garbled apology: too much Scotch, getting late, should never have. But he’s paused only to lever himself from the Venus flytrap of a sofa, and then he holds out a hand to me.
I take it.
I take it, and I let him lead me upstairs, even though I know what we’re about to do is wrong on so many levels. I take it because I’ve had a whole bottle of wine, because it’s late and he has come to me, because I’m tired of fighting how I feel, of pretending to myself that I’ve put the past behind me and moved on. I take his hand and follow him into our bedroom and let him undress me because I love him, and because in my head and my heart he is my husband, has always been my husband, no matter who he’s married to.
We are strangers who know every inch of each other’s skin. It comes as easily to us as it always did, but now it’s enhanced by the thrill of discovering each other all over again. I’d forgotten how much I like sex, the extraordinary capability of my own body to give me pleasure.
Afterwards, we lie in each other’s arms, my head nestled against his chest. Andrew has fallen straight asleep, as always. I listen to his heartbeat, pressing my palm gently against his skin. For so long, I’ve fantasised about this moment. Now it’s here, I can’t quite take it in.
I extricate myself from his embrace without waking him, propping myself up on my elbow as I watch him sleep. I don’t know why he’s come back to me now, after all this time, but I’m not going to question it. This is what I’ve wanted since the day he left: for him to come to his senses, realise what a fool he’s been, and come back to me. He didn’t exactly say that in so many words, but then we didn’t waste much time talking. It’s obvious what he meant. He’s here. That’s all that matters.
So why this strange sense of … anticlimax?
It wasn’t the sex. That was satisfying on both a physical and emotional level. And yet I feel oddly flat, the way you do on Boxing Day after all the anticipation and excitement of Christmas. Wonderful as it was, of course it couldn’t live up to the weight of four years of expectation. Nothing ever does.
I wish I could let him sleep, but I can’t risk Tolly bouncing in at five a.m. and finding his father in my bed. We need to break this carefully to the children, once we’ve worked out the logistics of Andrew moving back in. I know how close Bella’s got to Caz. I don’t want to alienate her any further. This is going to take a bit of finessing as far as she’s concerned.
I nudge Andrew, smiling as he opens his eyes. ‘I hate to wake you, but the kids can’t find you here.’
He glances at his watch and sits up abruptly. ‘Shit. Is that the time?’
‘The spare room’s all made up. You can—’
‘I need to get back to Caz. She’ll be wondering where the hell I am.’
I watch in silence as he yanks on his trousers and sifts through the tangle of clothes on the floor for his socks. I’d assumed, because of the holdall with which he’d arrived, he’d already told Caz he was leaving her. A faint sense of unease steals over me. He must be going back to break the news to her now. He wouldn’t let me down again.
He finds his socks and sits next to me to put them on. Tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, he looks deep into my eyes. ‘You are incredible,’ he murmurs. ‘I can’t tell you how much I needed that.’
I digest that for a moment. Sex is different for men, of course. It’s the way they communicate. How they show love. They don’t need to actually say it.
‘What are you going to tell Caz?’ I ask tentatively.
‘She knows I came over to check on Bella. I’ll just tell her I had too much to drink, slept it off for a couple of hours on the sofa. She won’t like it, but I’ll smooth things over somehow.’
Smooth things over? You don’t smooth things over when you’re leaving your wife. You do it when you don’t want to be found out.
A cold stone settles in the pit of my stomach. ‘Andrew,’ I say slowly. ‘Andrew, when you said you’d been a fool, what exactly did you mean?’
Four days before the party
Chapter 34
Caz
I pace the empty house in the dark, waiting for Andy to come home, too agitated to sleep or even distract myself with mindless television. Midnight comes and goes, and his locator dot steadily pulses from Louise’s house. It hasn’t moved in hours. I picture Andy glancing at his phone when it buzzes with my texts, dismissing the notification without even bothering to open it, or maybe showing it to Louise, the two of them laughing at me as I wait pathetically for him to return. Or is his phone unattended in his jacket pocket, flung over the back of a kitchen chair or strewn on the bedroom floor? Is he fucking her, right now?
With a shout of frustration, I fling the phone across the room and collapse sobbing onto the sofa. He’s never stopped loving her; I’ve always known it. My mother was right: you can’t build a solid house on shifting sands. He’s weak. It’s the reason we’re together in the first place.
The story Andy believes, the story I’ve told and retold so often I’ve almost come to believe it myself, is that we met by chance. A fender-bender at the junction of Clerkenwell Road and Hatton Garden: we literally met by accident, Andy always says, when he tells the story, the happiest accident of my life. He doesn’t remember that we’d already met, fleetingly, six weeks earlier when Tina introduced us at the RSPCA charity auction. We barely exchanged three words that night, but for me it was enough. It wasn’t hard to find out Andy’s routine, and to be in the right place at the right time: he presented the evening bulletin at INN every night, and took the same route to work at the same time each day. All I did was create an opportunity.
But I didn’t force him to start an affair with me. You can’t steal someone’s husband; they’re not lipsticks to be pocketed when the store manager’s back is turned. If Andy’s marriage had been happy, we’d have exchanged insurance details, and that would’ve been the end of it. He wouldn’t have called me the next day, and asked me out for a drink. He wouldn’t have leaned across the pub table and tucked my hair behind my ears and told me I was lovely.
Andy led me on, I think furiously. He made me think he was falling in love with me, he encouraged me, he came to me when he found out Louise had cheated on him. He didn’t have to, but he did. He married me. He doesn’t get to change his mind now. This isn’t the playground. There aren’t any take-backs here.
Eventually I must fall into some kind of half-sleep on the sofa, because I don’t hear Andy come in, and startle when he touches my shoulder. ‘Why are you sleeping down here?’ he whispers.